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Of Pseudonyms and a Sudden Influx of Titles

There once was a man named Lyle S Tanner. In April of 2012, he put out his first short story and started really working on his series, Tales from the Twisted Eden Sector. It is a short story series that he put a lot of time and effort into, putting out books twice a year and hoping to finish the series in April of 2016 with a total of six collections and a tie-in novella.

If you read the title of this blog post, you’ll see where I’m going with this.

Back when I was first deciding how to go about the publishing thing and decided to try self publishing, I was worried about what would happen if I did actually do it and how I would do it. I researched and tried to make sure I knew as much as I could before I started.

There were a lot of articles at the time about people losing their day jobs for writing racy fiction. More talked about how JK Rowling and others changed their names to be less feminine so that they didn’t get put in a female writers corner and could appeal more broadly in genres that alienated them.

I made the decision to use a pseudonym because of all of it and started putting out books under Lyle S Tanner, both to protect myself from any repercussions from my day job, and to avoid getting put into the romance category because of my name.1 And for a while, things were pretty good.

One of these days, I’ll go through everything I learned as Lyle. I had the freedom under that name to make a lot of mistakes and try out different tactics and strategies, seeing what worked and what didn’t. I used Twitter and Facebook and tried to make him as real as I was.

Unfortunately, now that I’m publishing under my own name, those efforts have tapered off into pretty much nothing. Maintaining him as a separate entity has gotten exhausting and I just haven’t been able to do it. While I have plenty of energy to work on the next book2 I just can’t seem to keep up with the other elements of the identity.

And so, that’s why you’re going to start seeing an influx of new books. I’ll be slowly moving the books over to my own name over the next little while3 and I’ll be talking about them as well here and there. It’s a bit of a strange series, but I love writing it and I do hope you’ll check it out.4

As for Lyle, he’ll fade away. It’s been an interesting run,5 but this is the end of his story. Time to continue on with my own.

I don’t really do romance. It’s in there, but very rarely a focal point. [↩]